When Google answers before your website does

Search for almost anything practical now and there is a good chance the first thing you see is not a list of websites. It is a paragraph of text, written by Google's AI, answering the question directly. Below it, the links.

For a small business that spent years trying to get onto the first page, this feels like the ground moving. It is worth looking at what the evidence says before deciding what to do about it.

What the numbers say

The clearest study so far is from Pew Research Center, published in July 2025. They looked at the real browsing of 900 adults in the US during March 2025. Their findings:

• When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits. Without one, they clicked in 15%.
• People clicked a link inside the AI summary in just 1% of visits.
• 58% of the people in the study ran at least one search that produced an AI summary during the month.

That is American data, and Greek search behaviour may differ. But the direction is not hard to believe: when the answer is on the page, fewer people leave the page.

What it means for a local business

Here is the part I find reassuring. Most of the traffic that disappears is for informational questions: "how often should a boiler be serviced", "what is the best time to dive in Mykonos". Those were never the searches that brought a small business its customers directly.

The searches that do — "electrician in Nea Moudania", "dentist open Saturday Kalamaria", "suites with a pool in Halkidiki" — still end with a person choosing a business. The difference is that increasingly an AI chooses the shortlist first. And it can only put you on the shortlist if it can find the plain facts about you.

What is still worth doing

1. State the facts plainly, in words. Where you are, what you do, which areas you serve, your hours. Not in an image, not buried in a slogan. An AI summary is built from text it can read.
2. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and consistent. Google's own guidance says local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence includes reviews and how much is written about you elsewhere.
3. Give each service its own page. A page called "Services" with six items is weaker than six pages that each answer one question well. The Electrotechs website was built this way: installations, security, automation and smart homes each stand on their own.
4. Answer the questions customers actually ask. On the page, in their words, in the languages they search in. The Olea Suites site describes each suite's size, capacity and amenities in both English and Greek because those are the exact questions a guest asks.
5. Stop measuring success only by clicks. If fewer people click but more of them call, book or ask for a quote, that is not a loss.

ElectrotechsAn electrician's website built to be found — by search and by AI assistants

The honest version

Nobody can promise you a place inside an AI answer. Anyone who does is guessing. What you can do is make sure that if an assistant goes looking for a business like yours, in your area, it finds clear and consistent facts about you. That is the whole of our AI visibility work, and most of it is plain writing rather than technology.